Ways to Improve Language

Grammar Error Correction

Grammar Correction Best Practices

The art and science of grammar correction has seismic implications on native and new speakers to English alike. The ability to communicate in a clear and cohesive fashion, both verbally and in writing, whilst using the proper syntax, punctuation, sentence structure and spelling is vital for the message to be clear. Further, it is seen as a sign of intelligence or lack thereof for someone to use the obviously wrong words and sentence structure while communicating in writing or via speech. While grammar and languages teachers are perhaps fighting a losing battle right now given the fairly sloppy nature of many people including supposed language professionals like writers and journalists, there are indeed some verifiable and known best practices that can and should be used to help combat the grammar failures that pervade the sphere of communication in the United States as well as around the world.

Analysis

Grammar has become an endeavor that seems to have people on autopilot nowadays. This condition has become so engrained that it is common place for people to just rely on the spellcheckers in Microsoft Word of the "autocorrect" function of smartphones to save the proverbial day as it relates to whether something is said and spelled right. However, given the presence of homophones, homonyms and words that are quite similar in spelling, this is not the best idea and too much haste and disregard can lead to a butchered message even if the words are all technically spelled right. Reading any comment board on a website shows this problem in gritty detail as people will blatantly confuse their and they're, your and you're and so forth. However, it sometimes goes to the point where similar words are used interchangeably when they absolutely do not mean the same thing such as downgrade and degrade, loan and borrow and so on. There are some that perhaps try to speak at a higher level than their vocabularies allow. Regardless, it is something that leads to henpecking and references to "grammar Nazis" when more learned people, perhaps flustered about the perceived dumbing down of American or other speech patterns, decide to correct people on the spot even if the advice-giver is not a teacher and/or the forum is not a classroom of any sort (Schwenger).

There is another end to the spectrum of corrections and that would include people that take correction stylistics so far that they use fancy algorithms and other complex techniques to address grammar errors in speech of any form. However, even fancy approaches like this cannot negate the fact that practice, context and communicate itself is the best way to expand and hone one's grammar and other language skills. However, it is also asserted by many that zero tolerance and aggressive grammar rules are perhaps actually counterproductive in the long run. Part of the problem is that the people engaging in the errors often do not know they are making the errors unless or until they are corrected and this obviously would impede their ability to self-identify what they are doing wrong and self-correct their errors without the need for a high amount of teacher intervention. Even so, people learning a second language and its grammar structure seem to be benefit more from explicit error correction while people struggling with their first language have more problems as they do not have a reference language in their past to compare and contrast with. Regardless of the forum or the language being learned and at what stage, the importance of practice and time of exposure and immersion into the language cannot be minimized or explained out of the equation of best practices and best outcomes (Chan).

The verbiage and parlance about the benefit and utility of grammar correction does not stop there. One particular perspective used by many is to assess the condition and happenstance of grammar errors and corrections when looking at people in different work fields such as engineering and computing. As already noted from another source, whether a person is learning their first or second language is no small factor and indeed many people learning a second language are not children still in their formative stages of growth as a human. It goes against the grain of teachers and educators to not correct someone when a student is obviously saying or writing something incorrectly in the intended language but many counter that explicit and immediate correction is actually harmful. One potential alternative would come along more when writing a term paper or something of that nature. Rather than fixate and analyze grammar as the paper is being written, it is asserted by many that going back through the paper after the initial draft is the wiser course as the rough draft is complete at that point and this is the best time to assess how to fix and structure things differently than they already are in addition to correcting mistakes. Doing the grammar review prematurely can lead to material being proofread that is just going to be changed or cut out anyway, is the salient point to take from this suggested alternative method. Along those same lines, another perspective is that composing a piece of writing is a part of the process of discovering meaning and disrupting that with grammar analysis can prevent the thoughts from flowing smoothly and uniformly. All of the starting and stopping that would ensue due to correction of errors or even general restructuring for flow and other reasons can lead to a disruption of the creative thought process and thus is counterproductive (Shin).

In terms of task complexity and when the proper timing is to do error correction is something that comes out of the woodwork in other avenues and arenas as well. When looking at the precise points in which students tend to make corrections, there are some major variances depending on the complexity of the idea as well as the complexity of the sentences themselves irrespective of what is being written about. The complexity of the errors themselves also had an effect. Smaller errors were almost always fixed right as they were written and immediately spotted.

More protracted errors made it much more likely for people to circle back after the sentence or paragraph was completed. These tidbits lend themselves to the idea of keeping major error corrections until the end or at least until a good stopping point rather than stopping the writing process as soon as they are spotted. It has also been found to be true quite commonly that many writers indeed do choose to forgo a good and thorough proofreading until the paper is at least in rough draft form. In general, it is deemed to be wise to disregard proofreading mid-composition as anything that takes away from the writing process in terms of content is going to be disruptive and a proofreading of the document should always be done after the draft is otherwise ready anyway. This way, it is only being done once (at the end) and the process of putting pen to paper, proverbial or electronic, is left as intact as possible. Also relevant are the internal and external forces that guide whether and when people proofread as they go along. To be sure, if more than one person is privy to a document being drafted, then corrections will probably be seen as more urgent than keeping a stream of consciousness or idea going. It is an area of research that is not covered all that heavily, at least per some researchers that themselves look at the topic, so it remains to be seen what the long-term research and ensuing effects will be and how they will render themselves (van Waes, and Leijten, and Quinlan).

The types of errors that are prevalent will obviously differ greatly and this thus would have an effect on what the focus of a teacher or grammar self-checker would need to focus on when looking for grammatical errors. For example, people learning English when they do not know any other language will make a decent amount of errors across the board. However, English as a Second Language (ESL) learners are worst about putting prepositions and articles in the wrong place or they omit them entirely when they should be present. It is estimated that ESL learners make anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of their mistakes on just those two things. For example, instead of saying "I saw a cat walking down the street," they might instead say "I saw cat walking down the street," with the obvious missing word being the article "a." Similarly, they might start a sentence with a preposition even though that is not proper grammar. Complicating the matter greatly is that English, while not the most complicated language in the world as many Indian and African languages are exceedingly more complex, is not an easy language to learn due in large part to its conflicting rules and conventions and its inconsistency with other languages. For example, Spanish speakers will typically put the adjective describing the item after the noun it references whereas the opposite is usually done in English. In other words, a person speaking in English would say "red car" whereas a Spanish speaker would say "coche rojo" (car red). However, it can get much more subtle and complex than that. For example, someone speaking English should not say "I saw a damage on the car." Instead, they would say "I saw damage on the car," as the article is not proper in syntax of what is being said. However, to say "a little damage" is actually not incorrect even though the adjective in between is the only real difference between the correct sentence and the prior mentioned wrong sentence (Chodowrow). The jump from one language to another can be greatly protracted and complicated when moving from a symbol-based language to one that is English-like, with the latter meaning languages that use the same letters as English but perhaps in a different form and fashion. Obvious examples would include Spanish, Italian and French. However, there are some languages in the center that resemble English but have special characters, whether it is several or many. Spanish has a handful but Eastern European and former Soviet bloc countries have letters and characters that bear some resemblance to English text but are obviously a lot different nonetheless (Suzuki).

The learner mindsets are more prolific when dealing with ESL leaners should be taken into account when deciphering how to teach and guide them. The beliefs of the learner have a strong correlation to strategy use, learner anxiety, proficiency and so forth. However, some beliefs are unrealistic and counterproductive and those must be countered and tempered as well. One major part of teaching someone a new language is to get them acclimated to the expected and proper form of the language through the use of repetition and structure. This approach is commonly called form-focused introduction (FFI) and involves the "division of language according to lexis, structure, notations or functions, which are selected and sequenced for students to learn in a uniform and incremental way." A nuance when speaking of this subject of how ESL learners focus on learning and improving is the manner in which error correction is approached. Rather than dispute that an error is needed, some ESL learners will instead focus on the type of error-correction approach is needed or proper to fix the problem. In terms of best practices, a wide-based approach that addresses what is generally acceptable and what is not will allow for learners to choose their own solution. As long as they know what solutions are acceptable and which ones are not, they should not be forced into one pattern over another. After all, there is more than one way to say the same thought even if the precise words are similar to identical. For example, saying "I saw a red car" is grammatically correct as is "I saw a car that was red in color." The two sentences are saying the same precise thing but with two entirely different structures. A gifted teacher would incorporate the different solutions as part of the learning while pointing out that there are multiple ways to say and express something correctly but there are many more invalid ways to do the same (Loewen) (Van Beuningen, and De Jong, and Kuiken). This is also something that English as a First Language (EFL) teacher should take into account but he age levels and demographics of the EFL and ESL learners are usually entirely different as EFL people are usually young children while ESL leaders run the gamut from young to old.

Something that was stated earlier is that methodology in teaching and learning grammar and its associated errors is vital in terms of efficacy and progress. The aforementioned debate about the form and timing of corrections to obvious errors by teachers or facilitators is still a subject of vivid debate but this debate has been raging for quite a while. As far back as the 1960, researchers were toiling with the proper methods and what to avoid in terms of hot to teach and correct grammar. Obviously, not much has changed since then. One research suggesting that has cropped up is delineating and demarcating "errors" and "mistakes" as they are not the same thing. An error, at least in the eyes Caroline Ho, are erratic errors that are not systemic and entrenched in nature while the latter, those being mistakes, are symptoms of a lack of understanding of the fact that a grammar snippet is wrong and why it is wrong. Use in the "damage" example above, that is a clear-cut case of a systemic problem because any fluent English speaker should know that the word "damage" should never be immediately preceded by "a." Similarly, any fluent English speaker should know that words that begin with consonants and are preceded by an article should have "a" rather than "an" and vowel-started words should be the opposite. If a person is mixing those two up pervasively throughout the paper, that is a systemic problem and would be a "mistake." Someone that slips up once and is otherwise correct on a long manuscript obviously just made a random error and actually knows better than to do that. It could be that they changed a word while forgetting to fix the rest of the sentence or something along those lines. As such, it is not remotely a best practice for a teacher to micromanage a student who clearly just made an isolated error. However, if they make the mistake over and over again, then this is a sign that some remedial follow-up is called for (Ho).

If there are some takeaways to glean from the literature review contained above, they would be as follows. First, repetition and proper structure are the major catalyst for someone learning a new language or improving the depth and breadth of a current one. A cookie-cutter approach of any sort is less than wise but straying away from core concepts and best practices is also something a teaching professional should do. Next, there is something to be said to being gentle and less nitpicky about every little error but there are limits to this statement including the type/manifestation of the errors in question as well as the perceptions and mindset of the learner. Third, while disregarding the mindset and opinion of the learner in favor of a scorched earth response is not the best idea but allowing the proverbial inmates to run the asylum is not a good idea either. After all, it cannot and should not be denied that people form perceptions about the quality and depth of one's speech ability and vocabulary. Obviously, intelligence and language ability are not directly linked but this does not stop people from drawing such a line in their own mind. This is obviously not fair or proper in many cases including just about all ESL learners. However, learners have to be made to understand that English is unlike every other language on the planet in at least one major way and the proper conventions and tactics need to be brought in the frame and used properly.